Jonah Krell is an ASU Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to cover Northwest Christian for AZPreps365.com.

Northwest Christian football does things slightly differently than your average high school.

It is a K-12 school that allows kids to play on the field at halftime and join offseason conditioning workouts. It consists of big families where tradition and faith is key. There are 225 boys in grades 9-12, and roughly 80 of them are in the football program. 

Through it all, Northwest Christian’s system has worked, winning three state championships, making it to the finals two other times, and recording a 114-24 record in David Inness’s first 11 seasons at the helm.

Inness, who also serves as the school’s athletic director, runs his fundraising operation differently than other schools, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity. 

Northwest Christian does not have a booster club to help raise its funds. Instead, each sport gets a “slice of the pie,” as Inness said, from the administration. The football team usually gets $12,000 to start with each season.

What makes the process interesting is that each sport has its own fundraiser to raise money on top of that, with Inness usually raising an additional $15-17,000 to run the program each year. 

Every year, the football team’s fundraiser is a professionally-made video showing the team and asking family, friends and alumni to help cover equipment, uniform and travel costs. Inness pays $1,500 for the video production, run by a national company called Vertical Raise. 

“I think it’s a super cool thing,” senior running back Grant Gibson said. “It’s something kind of different than the rest of our sports because you don’t see any other sports, at our school at least, doing videos like that. It’s a cool thing for parents to see, like they get to see a little bit of what’s going on at football because there’s some videos at the practices. It’s kind of just a fun thing to show how our team is bonding.”

The Crusaders had a particularly successful fundraising year before the 2021 season, with the team raising $30,000, virtually doubling what Inness usually receives. It took about three weeks to reach the number, with Inness saying the players had to buy into the process. 

Gibson credits the tight-knit Crusader community for the generous contributions, saying the parents “have our back.”

“That’s a huge number,” Gibson said. “It’s a hard thing to wrap your mind around — that that many people have donated that much money. They all want to rally around our team and support us, and it’s continual support because they’ve been doing it for years for us.”

Inness said that covering the costs of helmets is a major priority this year, with each costing $300.

He also has plans beyond this season to improve the program’s facilities. Inness is working on building a weight room and a changing locker room underneath the football bleachers, which could be used by the soccer team as well and open up a room for wrestling and cheer inside. 

“We need to upgrade our facilities,” Inness said. “Those dudes (the football players) would go crazy. The whole school would — it would open up stuff for the whole school.”

Inness said that plans are being drawn up right now for the weight room but it is likely two years away. His five-year plan is to install a turf field surface, to help cut down on maintenance needs and costs with the current natural grass field. On top of all that, Inness would love to schedule some out-of-state games just for fun. 

Sophomore wide receiver Kyler Thruston immediately smiled when hearing Inness’ hopes of adding out-of-state games.

“I wasn’t sure if he was being completely honest, but I think that would be so sick,” Thruston said. “Not many people get that experience, so I think it would be so fun.”

In each of his 12 years as head coach, Inness has tried to do something to help improve the football program. When he started out, Northwest Christian had to rent bleachers and did not even have visitor bleachers. While he says he isn’t leaving anytime soon, he hopes these upcoming renovations will be his legacy. 

“Each year we try to pick it up a little bit more,” Inness said. “I want a couple more things the young kids get to play on. As long as my health is good, I’m going to stick around.

“I’ve been doing it for 30-something years, I’m not going to do it forever. I love being the AD (athletic director), but it’s hard not to coach football because of these guys. They’re just great kids. All of our programs we love, so it’s fun.”